I currently have FontCreator 5.5, and I can go to the Format > Tables… menu option but I cannot figure out how to add new Font Tables to my TrueType font.
When you create a new font with FontCreator it adds only the required font tables in the TrueType spec. I need to add some of the optional tables from the TrueType spec (cvt, fpgm, prep).
How would one go about adding a new font table?
I searched the forum but found nothing.
As explained in the TrueType and OpenType specifications, those tables (as well as the glyf table) contain hint instructions. The hints are what make a font look good at low resolutions. You can’t add hinting through FontCreator, but you can use FontCreator in combination with Microsoft Visual TrueType (VTT). VTT is a professional-level tool for graphically instructing TrueType and OpenType fonts. VTT It is free and can be downloaded from here:
http://www.microsoft.com/typography/DevToolsOverview.mspx
Manually hinting a font is not an easy task and takes a lot of time.
Another way to improve the quality at small sizes is grayscale support. To enable it select Grayscale from the Format menu. Delete all entries. Now add a new entry and set “Grayscale rendering”.
More about hinting:
Basic hinting philosophies and TrueType instructions
The raster tragedy at low resolution
Font Hinting and Smoothing
Thank you for your reply. I will look into the Microsoft Visual TrueType (VTT).
However upon further searching the forums I found a very old post that suggests opening a font file that has the tables needed and deleting all of the glyphs and using that as a starting point for a new TrueType font.
I believe this is a valid work around as FontCreator does not appear to have the ability to add font tables.
Also I did not understand your comment on the greyscale support as a new font file already has that enabled, and I do not think this is what is hindering me at this point.
Thanks again for your help.
The tables you mentioned are global to the entire font, so this might work.
You are right, when you create a new font, it already has this setting. So this may only be useful when editing existing fonts.
It is all coming together for me now. I first posted asking for any help available when I really didn’t have a clue what I was looking for to begin with. I have since come to understand more about TrueType fonts.
The font tables I want to add are the tables that hold hinting information, and FontCreator doesn’t fully support hinting.
Found in FontCreator FAQ:
Q: My font only looks good at large sizes, what can I do to improve the quality at small sizes?
A: The quality has a lot to do with hinting. The hints are what make it look good at low resolutions. FontCreator does not fully support hinting.
Screen fonts are incredibly complex to make well, but if you want to hint your font then you could use Microsoft Visual TrueType to add hinting to your fonts. VTT is a professional-level tool for graphically instructing TrueType and OpenType fonts.
Another solution is grayscale support. To enable it select Grayscale from the Format menu. Delete all entries. Now add a new entry and set “Grayscale rendering”.
The third-party component I am using requires my TrueType font to have hinting, which it doesn’t since I created my font with FontCreator, which again doesn’t have full hinting support (like auto-hinting). So now I need to find a program that has auto-hinting capabilities.
Does anyone know if VTT (Visual True Type) supports auto-hinting?
Thanks again for all your help Erwin, it is all becoming quite clear now.
The blurb on the above linked pages seems to say that VTT is only for manual hinting of fonts. That leaves few options: TypeTool does it, but in my experience the results are not at all satisfactory. That leaves Fontlab Studio, Asia Font Studio, or the Open Source solution, FreeType. From reading their pages, I cannot even understand exactly what it does, let alone how to use it, though it does seem to support autohinting.
Yeah I looked at FreeType and it is just a development API for use in developing font editing applications and such. I don’t want to develop my own app however. I am just too lazy to learn the FreeType API right now. I am trying to provide a solution to a problem for a client and don’t have time to be developing something.
But I did find a $99 font editor that just might work for auto-hinting, that I believe the client has a copy of. I am hoping it will be sufficient.
Thanks for your post.